Each summer, Cedar Classical Academy crafts a strategic plan for the year. What is a strategic plan and how does it benefit you and your students?
A strategic plan is a list of specific and measurable goals that direct incremental improvements and initiatives at each level of the Academy’s governance: Board of Directors, Head of School, and Staff. Each year’s strategic plan is intended to progress the Academy toward its overarching five-year goals, and ultimately to help the Academy better fulfill its mission statement.
The Strategic Planning Process
Strategic planning is a deliberate envisioning process designed to find new ways of implementing an organization’s mission and vision. Each year, our Head of School, Governing Board of Directors, and some of our support staff members meet together to evaluate five key elements:
- Outreach: Admissions & Enrollment
- Program: Culture, Curriculum, & Pedagogy
- Leadership: Staff, Faculty, & Board
- Location & Facilities
- Finances
We follow a process to review our mission statement and vision statement (which do not change) and then to translate them into new one-year initiatives and improvements. It benefits a school if its leadership forever questions its initial model and assumptions, always measuring the Academy against what it set out to be. When we conduct our strategic planning process, we repeat the mantra that “a problem well-defined is a problem half-solved.” During strategic planning, we incorporate feedback not only from our parent partners and internal data, but also from outside experts to study how the Academy can improve each of the five elements listed above.
At Cedar Classical Academy, we are building an institution to last in an age when most institutions fail. Church researcher Thom Rainer estimates that “eight out of ten of the approximately 400,000 churches in the United States are declining or have plateaued.” In his book Growing a Classical School, David Seibel estimates that the average tenure of a school administrator is less than three years. The Association of Classical Schools estimates that more than 50% of school startups fail in their first five years.
Sigmoid Curves
All good things tend to follow a sigmoid curve. A startup school’s initial growth stage is slow. If it survives its first five years, chances are that it has what it takes to experience a rapid growth stage.
At a certain point, its growth will taper off or even decline. The way for a school to avoid decline is to continually create new sigmoid curves. In other words, if a school wants to last then it needs to constantly identify and pursue new areas of improvement. Some of the obvious new endeavors we have taken on over the past six years include adding grades each year and relocating to our current building in 2023.
Five-Year Goals
Each one-year strategic plan fits into our current five-year goal of growing to K-12 with a robust K-12 curriculum and culture. After crafting our first strategic plan in 2020, Cedar Classical Academy is currently in its fifth year of working on that goal. Next summer, 2025, we will create our next five-year overarching strategic plan.
One-Year Goals
In this year’s strategic plan, our two goals are (1) Developing faculty in the areas of unity, consistency, and excellence and (2) Engaging and equipping parents in the areas of community, unity, and buy-in.
How does this help you?
Having a strategic plan increases institutional stability. Because the Academy participates in strategic planning, you know that your school’s leaders are actively and annually seeking to make the school better. A stable, responsive, and improving school means a better education and experience for your students.
How can you help?
Well-Timed Community Feedback
Please consider participating in James 1:19 Night, which is a parent feedback session that we hosted in spring 2024 and will host again in anticipation of the creation of our next five-year strategic plan. All feedback helps us, but feedback that is well-timed and given in community is the most valuable for our strategic planning purposes and is more impactful than off-hand or isolated critiques.
Prayer
Second, you can pray. Pray for those two aforementioned goals for this year—that we can develop faculty and engage and equip you as parents. And please pray even now for wisdom for the Board, Head of School, and staff in the creation of the Academy’s next five-year plan.